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Posts Tagged with "Georgia prison strike"

I want to tell on my own behalf what’s going on behind these walls of GDOC (Georgia Department of Corrections). If possible, can somebody come and visit this prison and take a step into one of these cells? It’s sad. GDOC have the outside world thinking we’re just being punished, but the world doesn’t know that we’re being tortured and treated as stray dogs. If you look at the first “Planet of the Apes,” that’s exactly how we’re being treated. All I ask if that we get treated fairly.

On Feb. 9, 2014, prisoners in the special management unit of the Georgia Diagnostic Correctional Prison began another hunger strike to protest conditions. Some of the prisoners have had enough of the oppression and decided to take a true stand in fighting for their rights. Most of the prisoners participating are some of the same prisoners from the Dec. 9, 2010, and the June 11, 2012, hunger strikes, and these prisoners are again refusing to eat until conditions change.

The deplorable beatings you’re witnessing occurred on New Year’s Eve, just before midnight, on Dec. 31, 2010. It’s taken two years and nearly eight months for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to release this video. A very persistent family member of one of the victims finally persuaded them to give it to her, and Rev. Kenneth Glasgow, a strong advocate for justice for prisoners, posted it to YouTube for the world to see.

This powerful event resonated deeply, bringing meaning to the “occupy” movement and showing that its power is to support existent fights and organizing efforts for silenced peoples that have been raging on for years as well as to shed light on the increasingly po’lice controlled state that we all live under.

Everyone knows the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, higher than China’s with four to five times our population, and it continues to spiral. One in 100 adults is locked up in this police state, now totaling 2.4 million. Just as chattel slavery produced abolitionists, this new form of slavery must generate prison abolitionists.

On the United Nations’ “World Day of Social Justice,” Monday, Feb. 20, we are calling a National Occupy Day in Support of Prisoners. In the Bay Area we will Occupy San Quentin 12-3 p.m. Kevin Cooper, an innocent man on Death Row, joins the call to Occupy San Quentin and demand an end to capital punishment.

The article regarding the Georgia prison strike by Bruce Dixon of Marietta, Ga., was well needed. My name is Abdul-Mujahid-Khalil. I’m here with the brother Hamim, aka Shawn Whatley, and the rest of the guys mentioned in the article.

Inmate beatings by prison guards occur across Georgia following an eight-day peaceful protest to highlight inhumane conditions in the prisons. These protesting prisoners must be silenced because a whole range of corporate interests has found that they can profit from caging human beings.

On Dec. 9, 2010, thousands of prisoners in at least six Georgia state prisons initiated the largest prisoner strike in U.S. history, uniting across racial boundaries to demand an immediate end to the cruel and dehumanizing conditions that damage prisoners, their families and the communities they return to. Readers are invited to add their names to this solidarity statement.